Studying in SAC

School information

The Centre's overall mission is to undertake research, education and community outreach on the links between cultural and biological diversity.

The Centre draws on staff and students from across the School of Anthopology and Conservation, who conduct international research, coordinate postgraduate degrees, provide international training for capacity building, engage in community outreach, offer consultation services and edit a Berghahn Books publication series. We also have a small general reference biocultural collection, and an Ethnobotanical Garden created by staff and students.

Ethnobiology and biocultural diversity issues have become increasingly important globally, attracting considerable interest. The importance of ethnobiology and of biocultural diversity studies can be summarised thus.

In the last 30 years, scientists have appreciated the fundamental centrality of the interconnections between humans, other species and ecosystems:

this concept goes back to Darwin's notion of the web of life

the methodologies and theories to make sense of the interconnection are recent

The new interest has arisen out of intellectual developments within science, especially the rise of:

biodiversity studies

ecology

environmental anthropology

human ecology

systems theories

It has been catalysed by a practical concern for the role of globalisation in:

environmental degradation

erosion of genetic resources

loss of traditional knowledge

marine pollution

poverty alleviation

rainforest destruction

sustainable development

The key concepts ethnobiologists are developing to address these challenges include:

Agrobiodiversity: the importance of genetic diversity of humanly-transformed systems of cultivars and domesticates

Biocultural diversity: the strong interlinkages between cultural and linguistic variation and biodiversity

Co-evolution: the interactive evolution of species, ecosystems, cultural traits and social practices

Historical ecology: the transformation of the environment by people

Ethnobiology and biocultural studies seek to place these interactions and concepts at the centre of an interdisciplinary research and teaching agenda, which will focus on:

our understanding of global processes in the twenty-first century

how we should respond to them to ensure a sustainable future

how environmental deterioration accompanies cultural erosion

History of Biocultural Diversity studies at Kent

The Centre for Biocultural Diversity houses the Ethnobiology and Environmental Anthropology research group, as well as researchers from Conservation Social Science, in the School of Anthropology and Conservation at Kent.

Some notable milestones:

Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobotany Research and Postgraduate training established in the 1990s.

CBCD members have, or have had, leadership roles in the major professional bodies that represent the discipline, such as the Royal Anthropological Institute, the International Society for Ethnobiology and the Society for Economic Botany.

The CBCD is a regular partner in research and teaching with RBG Kew, the Eden Project, UCL School of Pharmacy, SOAS Endangered Languages Programme, the Global Diversity Foundation, People and Plants International, and The Christensen Fund.

CBCD staff are highly active in research and have obtained prestigious research grants from the ESRC, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, The Nuffield Foundation, The Darrel Posey Fellowship, Darwin Initiative, The Christensen Fund, The RAI Fund for Urgent Anthropology, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, the ESPA programme (DFID-DEFRA-NERC), the EU project The Future of Tropical Rainforest People.

Since 2007, the CBCD has hosted more than a dozen Visiting Fellows and PhD students.

The CBCD hosted the ERASMUS Intensive programme BIOCULTURE: Concepts and Methods, in 2010 and 2011, bringing together more than 100 students and several dozen teachers from 10 universities across Europe.

We hosted one of the largest ever meeting of the International Congress of Ethnobiology in 2004 and first ever to be held in Europe, with 516 participants from over 50 countries

Postgraduate teaching success:

Between 1998 and 2014, we have graduated 166 MSc and MA students in Ethnobotany and Environmental Anthropology, from 34 countries (34% UK, 20 % EU, 46% Overseas).

Research projects in more than 40 different countries.

Support from the Commonwealth and Chevening awards, travel grants from the Global Diversity Foundation.

A quarter of graduates have received distinctions.

Many have gone on to positions in International NGOs and research institutes in numerous countries (including Kew).

More than 25% have undertaken or are undertaking research degrees at Kent and elsewhere (Florida, McGill, Wageningen, Leeds, Kings College London, London School of Pharmacy, Oxford, Bradford, The New York Botanic Garden).

Since 1998, we have supervised 23 PhDs to completion in either Ethnobiology or Environmental Anthropology, and have 14 currently registered PhD students. We have had 13 ESRC studentships, including three ESRC-NERC studentships, and three recent ESRC-DTC studentships.

CBCD staff are participating in a new SAC undergraduate programme in Human Ecology.

CBCD Honorary Research Fellow and SAC alumni Dr Dario Novellino will be in Paris on January 16th, at a French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT) seminar to discuss the impacts of Palm Oil expansion on the Batak people of Palawan Island, Philippines, where he has worked for some 30 years now. He has also helped to design a cultural/artistic installation Son de Bosque (‘The Sound of the Forest’) at the Espace Belleville at CFDT to convey the feeling of living in these tropical forests and the threats posed by various external forces (logging, mining and now oil palm plantations) on the Batak and their way of life. The event is also aimed at raising solidarity funds to support Batak community-based initiatives and advocacy actions. For more information contact Helene Deborde or Dario Novellino.

Puri, Raj. 2015. The uniqueness of the everyday: Herders and invasive species in India. In J. Barnes and M. Dove, eds., Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Montanari, Bernadette and Bergh, Sylvia I. 2014. The challenges of ‘participatory’ development in a semi-authoritarian context: the case of an essential oil distillation project in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The Journal of North African Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13629387.2013.878247.

Montanari, Bernadette. 2014. Environmental concerns, vulnerability of a subsistence system and traditional ecological knowledge in the High Atlas of Morocco. In Mountains, Geology, Topography and Environment Concerns, edited by António Bento-Gonçalves and António Vieira. Hauppauge New York, Nova Science.

Osawa, Yoshimi and Ellen, Roy. 2014. The cultural cognition of taste term conflation. The Senses and Society 9 (1): 72-91.

Volpato, Gabriele and Howard, Patricia. 2014. The material and cultural recovery of camels and camel husbandry among Sahrawi refugees of Western Sahara. Pastoralism, 4(1), 1-23.

Volpato, Gabriele and Puri, Raj. 2014. Dormancy and revitalization: The fate of ethnobotanical knowledge of camel forage among Sahrawi nomads and refugees of Western Sahara. Ethnobotany Research and Application Volume 12: 183-210.

Waldstein, Anna. 2014. “What Can Ethnobotany Contribute to the Study of the History of Herbal Medicines? A Mesoamerican Answer.” In S. Francia and A. Stobart (eds.). Critical Approaches to the History of Western Herbal Medicine, Bloomsbury Press.

Cruz-Garcia, G. S. and Howard, Patricia. 2013. ‘I used to be ashamed’. The influence of an educational program on tribal and non-tribal children's knowledge and valuation of wild food plants. Learning and Individual Differences, 27, 234-240.

Howard, Patricia. 2013. Human resilience in the face of biodiversity tipping points at local and regional scales. In, O’Riordan & T. Lenton (Eds.) Addressing Tipping Points for a Precarious Future. British Academy and Oxford University Press.

Montanari, Bernadette, 2013. The Future of Agriculture in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco: The Need to Integrate Traditional Ecological Knowledge. In The Future of Mountain Agriculture, pp. 51-72. Springer: Berlin.

Roy Ellen and H Soselia, 2012. A Comparative Study of the Socio-ecological Concomitants of Cassava (Manihot esculenta) Diversity, Local Knowledge and Management in Eastern Indonesia. Ethnobotany Research and Applications 10, 15-35.

Roy Ellen, 2012. Studies of swidden agriculture in Southeast Asia since 1960: an overview and commentary on recent research and syntheses. Asia Pacific World 3(1), 18-38.

Roy Ellen and Simon Platten, 2011. The social life of seeds: the role of networks of relationships in the dispersal and cultural selection of plant germplasm. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17(3): 563-84. [Results of the Leverhulme funded UK Homegardens Project.]

Peter Giovannini, Viki Reyes-Garcia, Anna Waldstein and Michael Heinrich, 2011. Do Pharmaceuticals Displace Local Knowledge and Use of Medicinal Plants? A Study in an Indigenous Rural Community, Mexico. Social Science and Medicine 72: 928-936.

Visiting Fellows to the CBCD

The CBCB at Kent welcomes a variety of academic guests who benefit from one of the largest concentrations of scholarship in Ethnobiology and Anthropology and the Environment, while also making an important contribution to the intellectual atmosphere and various research and teaching programmes. Visiting Training Fellows are doctoral students finishing their theses, or producing journal articles, while Visiting Fellows include postdocs as well as senior scientists on sabbatical leave or working with CBCD staff. Our Ethnobotanist in Residence programme brings eminent researchers and practitioners to Kent, who support our MSc and PhD programmes. For more information, contact Dr Raj Puri.

Enrique Garcia Gomes is a Visiting Training Fellow from the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo (Spain), working on his doctoral research on the Ethnobotanical and ethnographic study of Quercus species and its fruits in the Iberian Peninsula. He will be translating chapters of his thesis for publication in English language journals, as well as consulting with Dr. Raj Puri in the context of his project on the Biocultural Diversity of Cork Oak Landscapes in Iberia.

Professor Arturo Perez-Vazques is a professor at the Colegio de Postgraduados (Postgraduate College in Agricultural Sciences) in Veracruz, Mexico. He did his PhD at Imperial College in Wye on urban agriculture and allotments. Since then he has conducted research in tropical agroecosystems, mainly on homegardens, but also on the use of wild native plants as ornamentals in green spaces. He teaches on the PhD Programme in Tropical Agroecosystems and is the PI for a project Agribusiness, Agroecotourism and Landscape Architecture (lipag.net).
Professor Perez-Vazques has received a sabbatical grant from CONACYT, the Mexican government’s Science and Technology Research funding body to take a one year sabbatical at the Centre for Biocultural Diversity at SAC to work on his project: Homegardens, agrobiodiversity and food security in Indigenous communities in Mexico.The Centre has several researchers, including Professor Patricia Howard, Professor Roy Ellen, Dr Simon Platten, and Dr Raj Puri, and former students and staff, that are or have been engaged in research on homegardens (or allotments) in the UK, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Isabel Diaz Riviergo, a PhD student at the Ethnoecology Lab in Barcelona, was a Visiting Training Fellow in the Centre in Autumn 2014. Isabel’s work links the study of the intra-cultural variation of local ecological knowledge with social networks. She adopts a gender perspective to assess differences in intra-cultural variation of knowledge and skills, and their relation to different gendered compositions of social networks in regard to subsistence strategies amongst the Tsimane’ people of lowland Bolivian Amazonia. She worked with Honorary Professor Patricia Howard. The Ethnoecology Lab is part of a European network of Universities teaching and conducting research in Biocultural Diversity studies: the network was set up as part of an ERASMUS Intensive Programme run by the Centre for Biocultural Diversity at Kent between 2009 and 2011.

Clive Dennis was a Visiting Training Fellow at the CBCD from May till September 2014, working with Professor Patricia Howard, on follow-up research to the CBCD project Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change. He is now a PhD student at Kent, working with Dr Raj Puri on Adaptation to Environmental Change among Banawa people of the Brazilian Amazon.